Language Documentation & Linguistic Theory 2 - Hans Rausing ...

More documents

Recommendations

Info

STUART MCGILL(10) is not of intrinsic interest (Dooley 2007) to the speaker, instead its role is totell us something about the monkey. It is only by considering the role of theparticipants in the wider discourse (i.e. discourse topicality) that the differences inmorphosyntactic coding seen in (10) and (11) can be accounted for.The third intonation unit in (10) (beginning n=ù-súmà) provides an interestingparallel to the second intonation unit in (11) (beginning n=ù-húnà). In both casesthe previous clause encoded the dog as subject by means of anaphoric genderagreement. In (11) the subject remains the same going into the second intonationunit, seamlessly transitioning from gender agreement to person agreement.However in (10), the subject of the verb ù-súmà is now the monkey, no longer thedog. Note that apart from the association of person agreement with topic that I amarguing for here, everything else points to topic continuity. The subject isexpressed using minimal coding and there is no discontinuity of action: the dog isfollowing the monkey with speed in one clause, and then something is running offin the next and neglecting to come back. Had the speaker been making a point thatdogs often disappeared off on their own while chasing monkeys, then no doubtthis sentence could have been used with the dog remaining as the subject referent.However because the hearer understands that in (10) the monkey and not the dogis topical, the speaker can use the 3PS marker u- without fear of ambiguity. Sinceanimal referents can only be encoded using person agreement if they arediscourse-topical, u- can only refer to the monkey in this text.This pair of examples also brings home the fact that discourse topicality isabout more than just referential density. In (10) four references to the dog aremade in the space of two intonation units, but it nowhere triggers personagreement. Simply talking about a referent is not enough to make it a discoursetopic. Instead, it is the speaker’s intrinsic interest that elevates frequentlymentionedreferents to the status of discourse topic, and, as far as non-humanreferents in Cicipu are concerned, allows them to graduate from anaphoric genderagreement to anaphoric person agreement.4.3.3. HumansIt does not follow that all human referents encoded in a text are discourse topics.Humans can be of trivial importance in a text, despite their inherent topicality. If areferent fails to persist and therefore does not integrate the discourse schema for atext, or if the interlocutors have no intrinsic interest in that referent, then it cannotbe said to be a discourse topic. So we might expect to find some examples of nontopicalhuman referents in the corpus, and thus it is a non-trivial question as towhether they will be marked with gender or person agreement. Briefly, the answeris that human referents in the corpus are usually marked with person agreement,but gender agreement is likely to persist longer (i.e. across intonation units) fornon-topical referents.229
LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION AND LINGUISTIC THEORY 25. CONCLUSIONWe have seen that there are two paradigms of agreement morphology in Cicipu,one inflected for gender and the other for person, and in section 4 I set out thefactors relevant to this alternation with regard to subject agreement. Wheneverthere is an explicit subject NP (i.e. grammatical agreement) the features on theverb must match the features on the subject NP. 10 When there is no subject NP(i.e. anaphoric agreement) either gender or person agreement may occur.Anaphoric chains can progress from LEXICAL NP > GENDER AGREEMENT >PERSON AGREEMENT. This happens more quickly if the referent is high intopicality and/or animacy, and the effect of topicality is particularly clear withanimals.Anaphoric agreement markers occur with both topics and non-topics in Cicipu.Therefore topicality should be considered an independently-varying dimensonwith respect to the classification of agreement markers, not one determined by thegrammatical vs. anaphoric agreement distinction, and thus it is possible to havedistinct dependent markers encoding different information statuses (contraSiewierska 2004).Finally, neither sentence topic nor referential density are sufficient to accountfor the examples in section 4. Instead we need a theory of discourse topic that alsotakes into account the intrinsic interest which the referent holds for the speaker.Unlike generativists, most typologists hold that linguistics should be grounded inempirical data. Consequently typological claims about the nature of agreementand incorporated pronouns should take into account the possibility of grammaticalstructure being influenced by discourse topic as well as sentence topic.REFERENCESBresnan, Joan & Sam A. Mchombo. 1987. Topic, pronoun, and agreement inChichewâ. <strong>Language</strong> 63, 741-82.Chafe, Wallace. 1994. Discourse, consciousness, and time. Chicago: University ofChicago Press.Corbett, Greville G. 2003. Agreement: the range of the phenomenon and theprinciples of the Surrey Database of Agreement. Transactions of thePhilological Society 101, 155-202.Corbett, Greville G. 2006. Agreement. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Crozier, David. H. 1984. A study in the discourse grammar of Cishiningi. PhDdissertation, University of Ibadan.10 The exception to this being the co-occurrence of an NC8 controller and a vowel-initial verb, asmentioned in section 4.2.230
Page 2: Gender and person markers in Cicipu
Page 5 and 6: LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION AND LINGUIST
Page 7 and 8: LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION AND LINGUIST
Page 9: LANGUAGE DOCUMENTATION AND LINGUIST

Language Documentation & Linguistic Theory 2 - Hans Rausing ...

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

Delete template?

Save as template?